rescuing democracy Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig . 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) rescuing democracy: how public deliberation can curb government failure. Copyright © 2016 Paul E. Smith. This work carries a Creative Com- mons by-nc-sa 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform, and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors and editors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punc- tum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commer- cial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2016 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. www.punctumbooks.com isbn-13: 978-0-9982375-0-3 isbn-10: 0-9982375-0-7 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei reSCuing DemoCraCy paUL E. SMItH How public Deliberation Can Curb Government Failure To my grandchildren Jet, Thomas, Ella and Lila. May their generation — and those that follow — govern themselves better than ours does. Contents List of figures and tables 14 Acknowledgements 15 Synopsis 19 1. Signs of failure 35 part i Diagnosing dysfunction 2 . Democratic dysfunction from fundamental structure 55 2.1 The function of democratic government 56 2.1.1 Social choice by democratic government 64 2.2 Ambiguous delegation 69 2.2.1 Obstructions to communicative democracy 75 2.2.2 Citizens as directors 81 2.2.3 Ignorant directors 84 2.2.3.1 Fairly stable motivations of citizens’ ignorance of public goods 88 2.2.3.2 Relatively dynamic motivations of citizens’ ignorance of public goods 92 2.2.4 Unconscious directors 95 2.2.5 Failure in accountability and legitimacy 102 2.2.6 A less fundamental type of ambiguous delegation — supermajoritarianism 105 2.2.7 An objection to ambiguous delegation being seen as a major problem 106 2.2.8 An overview of ambiguous delegation 108 2.3 Excessive competition 109 2.3.1 Competition distracts politicians from producing public goods 114 2.3.2 Competition tempts politicians to sell legislation 115 2.3.3 Political competition intensified by commercial competition 120 2.3.4 Exacerbation of political competition by ambiguous delegation 121 2.3.5 Minimizing the damage from competition 122 2.4 Excessive compromise 123 2.5 Triple dysfunction 126 2.6 Checking the hypothesis by backward mapping from two democratic failures 129 2.6.1 Neglect of the long term in Australian politics 130 2.6.2 Recurrence of environmental policy failures 134 2.7 Summary and implications 137 3. Susceptibility to dysfunction: Types of democracy 141 3.1 The Nordic democracies 142 3.2 The case of the United States 146 4. Susceptibility to dysfunction: Types of issue 159 4.1 Issue characteristics that create problems for liberal democratic governments 160 4.2 Three cases of irresponsibility by liberal democratic governments 167 4.2.1 Size of population 170 4.2.2 Global warming 176 4.2.3 Unemployment 186 5. A pervasive symptom of dysfunction: Escalating the scarcity of natural capital 191 5.1 Illustrating the problem 194 5.1.1 Characteristics of the choice on economic growth that confuse democracies 196 5.2 Two key concepts for the scarcity multiplier analysis 198 5.2.1 Inflating want by supply 198 5.2.2 Private goods bias 203 5.3 The scarcity multiplier 206 5.3.1 The mechanism 207 5.3.2 Extreme scarcity from the private goods bias 218 5.3.3 Three reinforcements of the scarcity multiplier 219 5.3.4 The influence of each iws system and their control 223 5.3.5 Motivators of the scarcity multiplier other than politi- cal decisions to privatise public natural capital 224 5.3.6 Costs and benefits of the multiplier 228 5.4 Implications of the scarcity multiplier 234 5.5 Conclusions for Part I 242 part ii Prescribing a remedy 6. The People’s Forum: A deliberative aid for liberal democracies 247 6.1 The mission, strategies and shape of the People’s Forum 250 6.1.1 The focus of the Forum 253 6.1.2 The structure of the poll 255 6.1.3 Voting process 256 6.1.4 Ballot paper 258 6.1.5 The execution of the Forum’s strategies 260 6.2 Evaluating democratic institutions 262 6.2.1 Political equality goods 266 6.2.2 Governmental goods 268 6.2.3 Institutional goods 270 6.2.4 Evaluating goods of democratic institutions 274 6.3 Five major functions of the People’s Forum 275 6.3.1 Public deliberation of issues 275 6.3.2 Deliberating what is to be deliberated 277 6.3.3 Examining basics 278 6.3.4 An element of meritocracy 280 6.3.5 Economizing citizen effort 285 6.3.6 Summary of anticipated contributions by five major functions of the Forum 286 6.4 Initiating and running the Forum 289 6.5 The People’s Forum compared with principles and designs for deliberative democracy 291 6.5.1 The People’s Forum compared with principles for deliberative democracy and public management 292 6.5.2 The People’s Forum compared with other proposed deliberative designs 297 6.5.2.1 The Popular Branch 297 6.5.2.2 The People’s House 301 6.5.2.3 Pyramidal democracy 305 6.5.2.4 Comparing the four designs and observations on five more 311 6.6 Perspectives on the promise of the People’s Forum 320 7. Design details of the People’s Forum 325 7.1 Twelve functions of the People’s Forum 325 7.2 Elements of the design of the People’s Forum and why they should produce its twelve functions 327 7.2.1 Twenty-two elements of the design 327 7.2.2 Function 1 329 7.2.3 Function 2 342 7.2.4 Function 3 343 7.2.5 Function 4 349 7.2.6 Function 5 350 7.2.7 Function 6 354 7.2.8 Function 7 355 7.2.9 Function 8 355 7.2.10 Function 9 355 7.2.11 Function 10 360 7.2.12 Function 11 361 7.2.13 Function 12 363 7.3 Comments on design element E1 — the ballot paper 372 8. Likely reactions to the Forum 381 8.1 A closer look at the differing reactions of liberals and conservatives 383 8.2 The applicability of the People’s Forum to the polarized politics of the USA 394 8.3 General prospects for the Forum 397 9. Supporting devices, performance indicators and trialling the People’s Forum 401 9.1 Devices that may synergize with the People’s Forum 402 9.2 Performance indicators for the People’s Forum 415 9.2.1 Indicators of achievement of mission (indicator types i & ii) 417 9.2.2 Indicators of execution of the first strategy (indicator type iii) 418 9.2.3 Indicators of execution of the second strategy (indicator type iv) 419 9.3 The inadequacy of small-scale trials of the People’s Forum 420 9.3.1 Simulation instead of small-scale experiment 424 10 . Conclusion 427 Afterword. A method for designing political institutions 439 The five strategies of the method 442 “Pushing and pulling” as science 448 Applying the five strategies 452 The method as a theory of institutional design 454 Appendix. Population growth and the scarcity multiplier in Tasmania 457 References 469 Index 501 L ist of figures and tables Figures 2.1 The triple dysfunction hypothesis 126 5.1 The scarcity multiplier 211 8.1 Theoretical model of relations among ten motivational types of value 386 A1. An historical overview of Tasmania’s natural increase and net migration 459 A2. Components of Tasmanian migration for the past 40 years 459 A3. Tasmania’s journey to 500,000 460 A4. Unemployment rates in Tasmania and Australia 462 Tables 2.1 Behavioural biases that generate environmental policy problems and suggest solutions 135 6.1 Anticipated contributions to PF strategies and goods by five PF functions 287 6.2 A comparison of goods anticipated from four institutional designs 312 8.1 Definitions of motivational types of values in terms of their core goal 386 Acknowledgements This book would not have been written without the initiative of Jamie Kirkpatrick, Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania. His invitation that I en- gage in research at his school gave me the resources to do the job, so I thank him for his generosity and enterprising spirit. A major part of those resources was academic guidance from Pete Hay and then, as the project developed, Aidan Davison, who backed up warm encouragement with astute queries. Michael Lockwood, Graeme Wells, Kate Crowley and Marcus Haward also assisted. From outside this university, help was given by Graham Smith, now at the University of Westminster, Stephen Coleman at the University of Leeds and John R. Alford at Rice University. Some of the ideas that are presented here were developed much earlier during several decades of political and environ- mental activism. In that phase I owed much to the stimulation, suggestions and criticisms of more people than I can recall. My father Edmund (Eddy) Smith started me off in this direc- tion more than half a century ago by taking me along on fish- ing trips. This contact with the outdoors started to give me an appreciation of that all-encompassing public good, the natural environment. In the 1960s he got me thinking with the sugges- tion that, for a developed society such as Australia, further eco- nomic growth was no longer worth the trouble it caused. No doubt his assessment came from being well-educated in how to enjoy natural and rural environments. He was raised on a farm, learned how to catch trout in a nearby creek and studied science at university. To such experiences he added a political perspec- tive from his father, a carpenter, prospector and farmer who ob- served that, as a rough rule of thumb and especially for complex and long-term issues, ‘the majority is always wrong’. Tasmania’s wilderness has given a strong motivation to write this book. To grow up learning to appreciate the beauty and challenge of wild places and then seeing them being progres- sively dismembered is a harrowing experience — but it made me think. For twenty-five years I was in a good place to do this, for I worked as a planner and district administrator in Tasmania’s Forestry Commission (now Forestry Tasmania), a government agency that was, and remains, a major force in the destruction of wilderness and other natural values. My acknowledgement of the contribution of wild places to the work presented here is made very seriously. It seems to me that such sources of inspira- tion drive thinking that may not otherwise occur. In their ab- sence one can be blind to ways in which humanity can flourish. I thank my brother Marcus, partly for bouncing ideas but mainly for helping me build a small house in the country. This has been an idyllic base for working on the project. Jack and Christine Lomax were very supportive, while fizzing with po- litical indignation. Rod West encouraged me to pursue my concerns at the University of Tasmania and in the final stage of writing, Nick Sawyer gave a helpful review of the synopsis. My ‘scarcity multiplier’ theory in Chapter 5 has brewed for forty years and owes much to ideas, criticism and encouragement from Chris Harries, Geoffrey Lea and three anonymous review- ers for the journal Ecological Economics. My ‘People’s Forum’ institutional design was developed from a discussion with Bob Brown in the late 1980s, eight years before he became the first senator for (and leader of) the Australian Greens. We were con- cerned about the lack of responsiveness of democratic govern- ments to what appeared to us as important, even fundamental, issues. Bob wondered whether improvement might be effected with referendums, perhaps the citizen-initiated type being used in California. The responsibility for what this thought morphed into, is entirely mine. The result has been sharpened over the years by communication with many concerned people. To ac- knowledge just a few of these I thank Ted Becker, Professor of Political Science at Auburn University, Alabama; Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, New Jersey; Hugh Mackay, Australian psychologist and social researcher; and Michele Levine, Chief Executive Officer of Roy Morgan Re- search in Melbourne. I am grateful to punctum books’ Founding Director, Eileen Joy for having the courage to publish this work and also to her Co-Director, Vincent van Gerven Oei, for his friendly and ef- ficient execution of that task. Finally, I thank Chia-Chin (Amy) Lin for her uplifting blend of derision and warm support over the last few years of this pro- ject. 19 Synopsis This overview of the book serves as an introduction and also as a compact explanation of the design and intended function of the new institution it prescribes as a remedy for democratic dysfunction. That explanation should help those who want to understand this design without reading the whole book, as well as those who do read it but then find they need a summary to help them judge the potential of this prescription. To begin then, we might observe that it has long been rec- ognized by academics and others, including many experienced politicians, that democracies tend to be seriously dysfunctional. For half a century, ‘public choice’ economists have theorized that the structure of liberal democracies makes their governments underprovide public goods. By ‘public goods’ these scholars ba- sically mean goods and services that are available to any citizen to use or to benefit from, for free or without direct, individu- al purchases. Public goods may be concrete things like public roads and also more or less abstract things like the security of a nation from attack, or social capital such as a general atmos- phere of trust between citizens. ‘Public goods’ contrast with ‘pri- vate goods’ largely by the latter being ‘excludable’, that is, owned by individuals or private entities like corporations — having been obtained by these owners by direct purchase, or by receiv- ing them as gifts, or by making these goods for themselves. Public choice scholars theorize that the purpose of gov- ernments — and the only justification for having them — is to provide important public goods that would not be provided or protected if there were no government to do it. They therefore